Looking for love: a reading of Apartment Zero

Asserting that gay male identity exists in the unstable frontier between culturally-defined notions of femininity and masculinity, this paper makes a close reading of the recent film Apartment Zero. This reading highlights the paradoxically aggressive and loving contest over the signs or trophies of masculinity--ranging from a soldier's cape to the phallus itself--which characterizes both homosocial and homosexual relations among men. Concluding that contrary to recent critical clichés, no subject can possess "the gaze," this paper describes the powerful desire to appropriate the signifiers of masculinity: a desire which can never be fully satisfied.